Taiyuan (Tàiyuán - 太原), Shanxi province

Rem Sapozhnikov / August 2016

I arrived in Taiyuan at about 2 pm. The air up there was even fierier than in Datong. While I looked for parking of official taxis and tried to imagine how people lived in such heat, several gypsy cab drivers lazily walked from the saving shade hoping to offer their service to me, simpleton visitor. I saw a parking with the official blue and white taxis to the right of the station exit, if you stand back to it. There I went.

I had visited this city back in 2014, so you may find pictures of its sites in my previous report.

In my last visit to the Taiyuan, the railway station square and some of the surrounding streets were dug up and fenced. After 2 years, all repairs were finished. Unfortunately, both of the two branches of the subway were yet under construction.

High-speed trains from Beijing and other cities instead of the old train station now go to the new South Railway station. One of the pages of this story is dedicated to it.

View of the railway station from the parking lot of official taxi.
New, unknown to me visually, lovely machine turned out to be the Chinese BYD e6.

Inside the taxi my attention was attracted to the original car dashboard. Then I did not know that this taxi is all-electric crossover and that the Chinese company BYD is the world's largest supplier of rechargeable batteries.

Same as many times before, I had forgotten the name of the hotel, but I had a clear idea where it was, and remembered the address, which I told to the driver – 126 Pingyang street. I quickly understood that he had a strange idea of houses numbering. As soon as we entered the street and spotted the house numbers – 5, 7, 11, etc., instead of safely going a few blocks ahead, the driver would slow down every second house trying to see its number. So we dragged two quarters like this, and then to the extent of my linguistic knowledge, I expressed my wish to pass 4-5 quarters ahead without stopping. I also told him that if I saw a hotel, I would tell him to turn around.